A role sitting open is not free. It is burning money every single day, quietly, while your calendar tells you the search is going fine.
Let us do the math that hiring managers usually avoid. The cost of a slow hire is rarely one number, it is four, and together they hurt.
The productivity bleed
Take a mid-level role with a £60k salary. Fully loaded cost to the business sits around £78k, and that person is expected to generate roughly 2x to 3x their cost in output. That is £400 to £600 of lost productivity every working day the seat is empty.
Hold that role open for 42 days, the UK average time to hire, and you have lost £16,800 to £25,200 in output alone. Not hypothetical. Real work that did not ship.
The candidate you actually wanted
Top candidates accept other offers in about 10 days from first conversation. If your process takes 21, you are structurally locked out of the best people.
That means you are not choosing between candidate A and candidate B. You are choosing between a fast decision on a good candidate and a slow decision on whoever is left.
Manager time, compounded
Every slow hire costs manager hours too. Interview loops, debriefs, scorecard calls, rescheduling, re-reading CVs. Call it 6 hours a week of a hiring manager’s time, at a £400 daily rate that is £480 a week, every week the role is open.
Six weeks of search and you have quietly spent £2,880 of senior time on hiring, on top of the productivity hole.
The compounding effect
Layer these costs together for one mid-level role that takes 42 days to fill. Lost output between £17k and £25k. Manager time around £3k. Probability of losing your top pick to a faster competitor: high.
Conservative total cost of a slow hire for a single mid-level role: £20,000 to £30,000. Hire five roles a year on this timeline and you have burned £150k before anyone even sits down.
The fix is removing the bottleneck, which is almost always the screening stage. Sieve reads and ranks CVs against your scorecard in minutes, so a 42-day process becomes a 14-day one. Start at sievecv.com.